Announcing the Disrupt London Hackathon judges, API workshop, and tickets

The TechCrunch Disrupt London Hackathon kicks off on Saturday, Dec. 3 at the Copper Box Arena in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and we’re honored to welcome this year’s stellar judges.

Saalim Chowdhury

Saalim is a recovering serial founder and startup enthusiast, and has sought refuge at 500 Startups. There he’s an Entrepreneur in Residence, where he finds startups to invest in primarily for the London Series A growth & investment program and works with them specifically on Enterprise Sales, Customer Centricity and Applied Machine Learning.

An old-fashioned polymath, he’s been a technical co-founder (CTO), a growth hacker (CMO) and led sales (CEO). Notable exits he’s been involved with include consulting talent on demand company Skillbridge (acquired by Andreessen-backed unicorn Toptal) and internet security firm ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco). For his sins he was once a News Corporation executive, and started his career at the Boston Consulting Group. He lives mostly in London and loves dogs and puns.

Kathy Dykeman

Kathy joined Facebook in 2010 and her mission has been to help clients reliably determine the impact of their advertising and strive for better industry measurement solutions for digital and mobile channels. Kathy has worked alongside top global FMCGs and Telco globally and across Europe in her current position. Before joining Facebook, London in May 2010, Kathy worked within the business development team at Harris Interactive UK. Stateside, she has served as a Vice President within a San Francisco based research consultancy, a government and academic research Director at Knowledge Networks and an Exit Poll consultant for the major news media in New York City.

Alex Peattie

Alex is the co-founder and CTO of Peg, a technology platform helping multinational brands and agencies to find and work with top YouTubers. Peg is used by over 750 organisations worldwide including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Google, and has the backing of 27 top angel investors from the worlds of advertising and tech.

Prior to founding Peg in 2014, Alex was a senior instructor at Makers Academy, helping hundreds of career changers train to become junior developers through MA’s intensive 12 week bootcamp. He also spent a number of years as a digital nomad, traveling and providing development consultancy to a number of tech giants and startups in Silicon Valley (including a year spent at GOAT from Y Combinator’s 2011 batch). His academic background is in Linguistics, and he takes a particular interest in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing.

Carmen Ruiz Vicente

Carmen Ruiz Vicente is a software engineer at Google DeepMind, where she works on technology for health services and patient healthcare. She has also worked on the Google beacon platform, including the open beacon format Eddystone, and Google’s cloud services that integrate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology with first- and third-party apps. She focused on the development of Android services that improve location accuracy and enable location-based interactions. Prior to that, she was a member of Google’s Privacy Engineering team, which is responsible for delivering and promoting tools, processes, culture and infrastructure to build privacy-robust innovative products and services. As a privacy engineer, she specialised in research and development on the topic of location privacy in location-based internet services.

Carmen completed her Ph.D. at the Center for Data Intensive Systems in Aalborg University, Denmark. Her primary area of research was Privacy-preserving Data Management techniques for Location-based Services and Social Networks. Prior to joining Google, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain).

Keith Teare

Keith Teare is Executive Chair and head of the Investment Committee at the UK’s newest investment company Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), with investments from the British Business Bank, L&G and Woodford Investment Management. He’s also the founder of Archimedes Labs, the Palo Alto incubator.

Previously he was a founder of TechCrunch with Michael Arrington, and before that at Easynet – one of the first Internet Service Providers in Europe, and the first to do a public offering. He also founded RealNames.

EasyNet and RealNames were both unicorns…. well before the term was coined.

API Workshop

Want to learn a bit more about the tools available at the hack? Take a deep dive into this API in a classroom-style setting.

Cisco – Saturday 2:00PM

In this workshop, you will learn about Cisco Spark’s platform and how to use the RESTful APIs. Create Spark rooms, send messages, add people, create a bot, or an integration to improve team productivity or solve a business challenge.

Twilio – Saturday 2:30PM

Twilio makes it easy to connect the people you care about in the languages and frameworks you already know. Come learn how to quickly build apps with Twilio SMS, Voice, and Video.